It was recently revealed that Twitter is cooking a new feature dubbed as the “Hide Replies” and will most likely be rolled out this June. Based on the information provided by reliable sources from within the industry, the preparation for the “Hide Replies” function was first spotted way back in February, and a lot of social media experts thought that the company had ditched their initial plans. Unfortunately, such beliefs were recently proved to be wrong. This is because Twitter has posted a blog post confirming that the feature is set to be rolled out this June. In an article published by Search Engine Journal, it was revealed that Twitter’s current move would be experimental. This simply means that the feature will be available to the public as a way for the company to evaluate the possible outcomes of this move. Thus, it is correct to conclude that the “Hide Replies” feature might be adopted and implemented fully or be scrapped instantly.
Twitter also stressed that the new feature provides users with the option to hide the replies that their tweets have received. Also, Twitter explained that the function is a good way for users to keep their conversations healthy. Although Twitter’s current move can simply be viewed as a simple way to improve user experience, it is regarded by a lot of users as a serious issue since this can be considered as a form of censorship. Aside from that, many users also view this feature as a good way to improve the privacy of the conversation that they have using the platform. Those who support the recent feature that Twitter is planning to roll out this June in defending the social media company’s move pointed out that the “Hide Replies” function, when implemented, is less extreme compared to what Facebook and Instagram have adopted which outrightly delete content that tends to violate the user’s privacy. As of the present, many SEO experts, digital marketers and Twitter users are left with no clue as to whether the feature will eventually be adopted fully or not. All that they can do right now is look for ways to adjust their Tweeting lifestyle to make sure that the upcoming feature will not negatively impact this.
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It was recently reported at the message board of Google’s “Small Business Community” will shut down and such report has caught a lot of website owners and digital marketers. This is because a lot of small businesses have been using its resources and utilise it for conducting meet ups as well as for sharing of information. Although the shutting down was previously considered as a rumour, the report was confirmed by an official message that was published last January 2, 2019. A portion of the message appeared in an article published by Search Engine Journal, and this revealed that the feature has only a few weeks. The message also hinted that the users could only access the feature until January 16, 2019. Due to this announcement, a lot of SEO experts and digital marketers believe that the shutting down of the Google Small Business Community was probably caused by the limited number of users. Such observation was based on the fact that it was only open to a limited number of business owners and a few chosen cities in the US.
Also, many experts also believe that the cancellation of the community’s existence was propelled by Google’s failure to open this feature for the use of more cities and in various cities. Other experts are quite convinced that the cancellation of the Small Business Community can also be blamed for the lack of a clear purpose where the feature can be used. Many business owners, even the smaller ones are not considering this as a tool for communicating with other businesses since they can accomplish such by establishing business connections using more established and popular platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Given these, the latest decision to shut the Google Small Business Community down marks another failure to Google’s effort to come up and create a well-established social network. Aside from this, it was also reported that Google+ would also be shutting down in the coming months. Thus, it is quite correct to conclude that Google still needs to spend more time and resources to come up with a more established platform that will offer the services that will allow users to communicate and socialise with other entities conveniently. 12/12/2018 0 Comments YouTube Originals in 2019YouTube has been a platform sensation throughout the years and has now been working on some changes, which includes taking out the Originals from the Paywall in 2019. Up until recently, only users with the Premium YouTube service subscription can view its original programming features, which is only available to 29 countries. This update is part of the platform’s strategy to shift to celebrity and creator-driven content.
What is the update about? Last week, YouTube made an announcement about its original programming to run its platform on free ad-support of 2 billion users. Some programs will retain the subscription-based option while this new update is a work in progress. But what this ultimately means is they will expand the audience of their Original YouTube creators and provide advertisers with great content that reaches the YouTube generation. Aside from expansion, this also leads to new sponsorship opportunities and new inventory that may become available in Google Preferred, which is an advertising program that allows marketers to buy ads upfront via YouTube’s top-performing channels. In other words, the company’s decision in making this transition is supported by Google Preferred in a better way. In addition to that, the previous service turns out to be an experimental strategy. Advertisers have asked for programming that is ad-free. It just so happened that in the last few years, and according to YouTube’s Chief Business Officer Robert Kyncl, their primary goal in putting up the YouTube Premium service was to get more subscribers attracted with the service. Eventually, they realised through experimentation that making the program free to users will help them make a lot of projects work well, and apparently, more inventory. While these changes signal a new phase for YouTube to gain more premium inventory options, this is also in favour with regular users who are YouTube aficionados and frequent visitors. The company no longer considers any pullback, and it’s a win-win situation for both sides anyway. As a fellow YouTube patron, it’s exciting to see how these changes will take place next year and what the outcome will be. It was recently confirmed that the Google Assistant intended for use on iOS received a significant update which surprised a lot of observers and digital marketers. This is because the said update is responsible for allowing the setup and activation of the Google Assistant on iPhone easier than ever. Given the said move, many iPhone users found out that the entire process of activating the Google Assistant on their phones was similar to what Android phone users have experienced. However, it was found out that to accomplish the activation, iPhone users are still prompted to go through Siri first. This simply means that users are prompted to say “Hey Siri” or hold down the power button of the latest iPhone models or the home button of the older models. By doing such, they can easily say “OK Google” or any of the available voice commands that they want. Aside from the information provided earlier, the news regarding the latest update on the Google Assistant for iPhones also revealed the steps involved in the activation process and these are the following.
Step 1: Check the iPhone’s iOS version The first thing that must be done by iPhone users to activate Google Assistant on their phone is to check the version of their gadget’s iOS. This is because the Google Assistant is proven to work only on iOS version 12 and higher. Step 2: Download the Google Assistant app After checking the iOS version, an iPhone user should download the Google Assistant from the App Store. After downloading, open the app and tap the button found on the bottom right corner of the device. Upon doing such, you will find the “add Google Assistant to Siri” option. Tap on the icon which states that “Add to Siri.” Step 3: Record the command After tapping the “Add to Siri” icon, the user will then be prompted to record a voice command. At this point, the user is given the option to use the suggested “OK Google” command. Furthermore, they are also allowed to record any other command. Twitter has recently released its latest official quarterly report for the third period of 2018, and this has shocked a lot of website owners, SEO practitioners and digital marketers. This is because the figures included in the report revealed that there was a great drop in the total monthly Twitter user count on the above-mentioned period. Based on the said report, Twitter has lost about 9 million Twitter users. The same report also revealed that the monthly active users or MAUs of the company were trimmed down from about 335 million to only 326 million. Although the difference is quite huge, Twitter was not that shocked. They consider this as an expected loss. Although such a statement can be regarded as Twitter’s way of reducing the impact of losing 9 million MAU, a lot of experts believe that Twitter is telling the truth. This is because Twitter gave a stern warning to its shareholders a few months ago claiming that they might lose mid-single-digit millions of MAUs in the coming months.
Experts have also hinted that Twitter’s anticipation and the tremendous drop in the number of MAUs were caused by the company’s initiative that was launched primarily to clean up Twitter by removing bots that are user base, bad actors and inactive accounts. It simply means that the drop of MUAs was triggered by Twitter’s efforts of actively removing suspicious and spammy accounts. Also, the campaign is also responsible for the prevention of creating new spammy and suspicious accounts. Given such numbers, it is correct to conclude that Twitter was able to wipe out more spammy and suspicious accounts as well as in preventing the addition of new accounts. Finally, Twitter hinted that they are expecting the loss in MAUs to continue and they will most likely lose the same amount by next quarter. 10/22/2018 0 Comments Bingbot Gets the Needed UpdateBing finally confirmed that its search crawler dubbed as the Bingbot was recently updated. Such news delighted a lot of site owners, digital marketers and SEO practitioners. This is because the recently-implemented update was designed to improve and to maximise the Bingbot’s crawl efficiency. It is worth noting the Bing’s latest move is essential since the Bingbot which is similar to Google’s Googlebot is responsible for crawling and discovering new and updated content and add these to Bing’s index. Thus, any improvement implemented on the Bingbot will surely affect the performance of any website and at the same time boost Bing’s relevance and popularity to users. According to some news published on the web, the implementation of the latest Bingbot update was probably brought about by a series of complaints from webmasters and directed towards Bing claiming that the bot does crawl frequently enough. Due to this, many site owners currently believe that the content included on Bing’s index might not be that fresh as they claim it to be.
Aside from that, there are also a lot of site owners who believe that Bingbot crawls too often and this causes many constraints to most of the websites’ resources. But even though both the previous claims are most likely true, Bing looked upon their system, and its assessment led to the realisation that the issue was an engineering problem which was not fully resolved yet. Thus, Bing took all the necessary steps to have the Bingbot updated. As of the present, Bing’s latest update is credited as responsible for helping site owners in making their new and updated content will look appear on Bing’s index in a very timely manner. Finally, the updated is also lauded for not compromising the performance of a website’s resources. Facebook recently confirmed that it had introduced a new tool dubbed as the Creative Compass. It also revealed that the said tool is designed to help digital marketers, website owners and businesses in measuring the effect of Facebook ads on the products or services that they are offering. Based on several news clips published on the web, the Creative Compass is designed to evaluate an ad creatively by examining some of its key elements. Also, the tool will include the ranking of ads based on a scale starting from the low impact to high impact. In an article published by Search Engine Journal, it was revealed that the evaluation of Facebook ads would be conducted by considering various aspects such as their noticeability, brand association and brand fit. Also, the additional aspects which include message comprehension, believability, information content, emotional reward and call to action are likewise taken into consideration.
Aside from providing the confirmation, Facebook also hinted that the Creative Compass tool would surely help businesses to understand the possibility that the audience that they are targeting will most likely take action right after seeing their ad. Furthermore, the tool will also help businesses in changing or cancelling that ads they post on Facebook to promote their product or services that are not effective in enticing the audience. Finally, it was found out that Facebook is currently testing the tool with the help of select partners. It was also revealed that Facebook is planning to make the tool available in 2019 to its marketing partners. It was recently confirmed that Google started monitoring as well as the recording of a number of phone calls that originated from call-only ads or call extensions all over the US.
Since this move is expected to create significant impacts on some users, advertisers and digital marketers, Google was obliged to provide an official statement regarding the latest initiative. According to Google, such calls are being monitored and recorded since this is a great way for the company to boost the effort in improving the quality of calls for the benefit of users and advertisers. Google also explained that when a certain user makes a call using a call-only ad or call extension, he will immediately hear a short message that will inform him that Google might record the call for quality assurance. Also, Google hinted that the recording would be used for evaluation to determine the site’s compliance with the policies of Google ads. Furthermore, the feature is intended to help evaluate calls to reduce spam and fraud. In case Google evaluated a call, and it finds out that an advertiser has violated the company’s policies, Google will automatically disapprove the ad or extension where the call was initiated. Google, however, stressed that advertisers could request to be exempted from call monitoring and recording if they are receiving calls that cannot be recorded for legal or regulatory reasons. Finally, Google cleared that advertisers will now be asked to opt-in to call monitoring and recording as a requirement for availing the call-only ads or call extensions. It was recently confirmed that YouTube is set to remove channels from its partner program. This is because such feature became a source of massive complaints from advertisers, users and digital marketers and almost all these surfaced due to duplication. Given this confirmed move, the channels are no longer able their content. It can be remembered that it is a given fact that channels can be conveniently removed from YouTube’s partner program by just a mere violation of any of its policies. However, YouTube stressed that the cause of the latest event was mainly due to duplication, coincidentally on the one area where people are asking more questions lately. Apart from the clear confirmation, YouTube through its representative tried its best to clear up the confusion that the company’s move has caused. This is by starting a thread on the YouTube Help forum which is intended to provide an explain the meaning of being removed from its partner program due to duplication. Aside from the details regarding the new move, YouTube provided additional information intended to help YouTube users to determine if their content is in danger of being removed due to duplication. Among the most significant indicators are the following.
Finally, YouTube stressed that the channels that were removed from the partner program due to duplication are still allowed to remove or update their content to comply with the policies set by YouTube. A lot of SEO experts, site owners and digital marketers have recently observed that there was an increase in the length of pages titles appearing in Google’s search result. Also, some reports also claimed a similar scenario and most of such observations were seen on Google search results snippets, according to a recent report. In an article published by Search Engine Journal, it was reported that RankRanger‘s tracking tools were among the first to show that the average length of page titles found in search results was stretched from the conventional 55 characters to about 83 characters by the time that the said article was being written. Aside from providing a clear report, RankRanger has also tweeted earlier this week posting an image that seems to showcase the alleged increase. By looking at the image of the graph posted on the tweet, it is quite clear to conclude that the increase in the length was gradual and eventually spiked to the highest peak on September 29. Also, a lot of experts believe that such condition was not just a temporary change since the increase was sustained for more than two weeks. But despite such observations, many experts believe that this condition should not be regarded as a concrete indicator on the increase in page titles’ lengths in search results will be permanent without a clear announcement from Google. This is because Google announced an increase in the length of meta description last December only to reduce it a few months after.
Given the uncertainty and the lack of official advise from Google, digital marketers, site owners and SEO practitioners are strongly advised not to implement significant adjustments to cope with the visible increase in the accepted page title length in search results. This is because doing such will cause them to roll out a major overhaul of page titles used in case Google decides not to push the increase in page title length. |
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November 2018
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